Matt Damon talks again about a possible Bourne sequel. Honestly, in my opinion, as much as I love the movies, I think it’s time to let it go. The Bourne Legacy had a weak plot and it’s time to let it rest. Reboot it in 30 years.

Last time Matt Damon, star of the original ‘Bourne’ trilogy, was out doing press, he said he hadn’t seen “The Bourne Legacy,” this past summer’s extensive reboot of the franchise that placed Jeremy Renner at the center of the action. The film upped the franchise’s science-factual underpinnings by having Renner’s character (part of the next generation of government-sanctioned killers) controlled by a series of drugs that would boost his reflexes and intelligence. When we spoke with Damon about the sequel/prequel yesterday, during the actor’s press rounds for the upcoming “Promised Land,” he did confirm that he’s seen the movie but said that it might make it harder for him to re-enter the franchise.

“I did see it…” Damon said, trailing off. When we asked him what he thought of the movie, he said: “I think it’s going to make it harder for us to make another one. I’m just trying to figure out like… Because they used our characters, anything that happens in that world, that’s the ‘Bourne’ world now. So the pill popping and all that stuff happens.” When we suggested that Damon’s Bourne character was actually from a different era of the project, he conceded a little bit. “Right, I’m from a different program,” Damon said.

When we asked if he would do one with Renner, he sounded even more skeptical. “I don’t know what that story would be,” Damon said. “I love Jeremy and I’m a huge fan of him and I know him personally and love him outside of work, too. But I just don’t know what that story would be. I could never see Bourne teaming up with anyone. And all he said was – he wanted out, he wanted out, he wanted out. So how do you get that character going again?”

Damon said that this was a problem that he had faced before, back when he and Paul Greengrass (who directed “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” and re-teamed with Damon for “Green Zone”) were trying to hammer out plans for the fourth film in the franchise. “Literally, we couldn’t figure out how to do it three years ago,” Damon said. He then broke down why, exactly, a ‘Bourne’ movie came out this year anyway. “The studio had a deal with the Ludlum estate and they had to get a ‘Bourne’ movie out. So they said to us, ‘Why don’t you guys do one?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know what to do!’ So once they realized we weren’t going to solve that problem, they went a totally different way.”

We’ll have more from our interview with Damon as “Promised Land” release date approaches at the end of the month.

At the New York premiere of his new film, the activist screenwriter/actor explained the intricate politics that drive the story he co-wrote with John Krasinski.

Even as camera flashes lit up Broadway and taxis shot uptown, Matt Damon’s mind was focused on the small, rural towns that dot the American landscape.

His new film, Promised Land, debuted Tuesday night on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, providing a smooth, celebratory push for a project that has already had a stormy path to the big screen, thanks to the politics of environmentalism and corporate influence.

Damon, who co-wrote the Gus Van Sant-directed film with co-star John Krasinski, stars as a hotshot salesman for a natural gas procurement company; his job is to get residents in down-on-their-luck rural towns to sign away the rights to drill deep into the shale deposits located underneath their land. It’s a controversial practice called fracking, which many scientists believe pollutes local water supplies with various chemicals, killing farmland and endangering the citizenry. Damon’s character, Steve Butler, argues that the sometimes-rich contracts are a godsend for the fading heartland, but is frustrated when a small Pennsylvania community decides to vote on whether to allow Global’s drills into its town. He also is surprised when he learns of some inconvenient truths about the process.

The natural gas industry and conservative organizations have already attacked the film as a liberal polemic (Focus Features CEO James Schamus jokingly thanked the Heritage Foundation in his introduction Tuesday), and while the movie does explain the downside to fracking, Damon’s main concern was using the issue as a greater statement about who controls American democracy.

“One thing [natural gas companies] are very worried about is decisions being made at the local level,” Damon told The Hollywood Reporter at the premiere. “They really would rather have decisions being made at the state level. And their argument is that it’s far more efficient for them to understand what the regulations are for an entire state, rather than try to argue town-to-town about how to do things and have different zoning laws.

“Okay, that’s an understandable argument,” he continued, “but the flip side of it for these local communities is like, are we going to let somebody legislate from the other side of the state what can and can’t be done in our actual backyards? So you can see each side there and we’ll see what happens. But this definitely takes the view that we should be in charge of what happens in our communities.”

In that sense, the outcome of the deliberation — which takes twists and unexpected turns — is not the film’s main concern. “The democracy has been hijacked,” Damon explained, and “it’s not about how they vote, it’s about them taking the vote back.”

One of the many big-name New Yorkers in attendance was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the lawyer and environmental activist, and he was far less circumspect on the issue of drilling for natural gas.

“I think that fracking ultimately is going to be a big mistake in our country,” he explained to THR. “It has a promise, which is that it will help make us energy independent, but we have much cheaper ways, more efficient ways, more patriotic ways and more wholesome and safe ways to do that. I think one of the things that the producers of this film wanted to show was the subtle ways that fracking doesn’t just poison water supplies but it poisons human communities, it poisons human relationships. It’s not a good thing for our country.”

One of the movie’s more subtle displays of corporate power comes when Steve and his co-worker Sue (Frances McDormand) shop for flannels and other regional-appropriate clothing at a local store. In order to convince the residents they have their best interests in mind, they must look like them — even if they’re just playing a part.

“Well we talked with landmen who do this, and a lot of them said ‘Look, the car you drive up in matters. You drive up in a foreign car in some of these places and they’re not really going to want to talk to you,'” the star recalled. “I talked to one guy who said he always puts on a John Deere hat before he goes out. It’s just something these guys do; they’re salesmen and they’re trying to make a sale and they want the people to identify with them as much as possible. So they have little tricks that they do.”

Whether or not the film changes any minds, it’s determined to at least open some eyes.

DEADLINE EXCLUSIVE: Matt Damon is negotiating to join The Monuments Men, the period drama that George Clooney will direct in January in Europe as a co-production between Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox. Damon joins what continues to be shaping up as an amazing cast. Besides Damon and Clooney, the film will star Skyfall‘s Daniel Craig, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin, Argo‘s John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville and Bob Balaban. Clooney and Damon did the Ocean’s Eleven movies together and Syriana.

The drama, which was scripted by Clooney and partner Grant Heslov, confronts the final chapter of Germany’s rule, which came down to the absolute destruction of everything that makes a culture keep its standing, including the lives that are lost and the sacrifices that are made. All of this is in danger of being lost forever as Hitler and the Nazis try to cover the tracks of a murderous regime. A crew of art historians and museum curators unite to recover renown works of art that were stolen by Nazis before they are destroyed.

Heslov is producing through their Smokehouse banner. Alexandre Desplat is doing the score, and the crew is the same as from the Ben Affleck-directed Argo, which Clooney and Heslov produced and Desplat scored. Damon will next be seen in the Oscar-bait Gus Van Sant-directed Promised Land, which Damon and co-star John Krasinski wrote together and which Focus Features releases wide January 4 after an Oscar-qualifying run later this year. Damon is repped by WME.

Matt Damon talks about ‘real’ role in ‘Promised Land’
Fifteen years after writing and starring in the Oscar-winning film “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon is both writer and star of another movie, “Promised Land,” this time with actor John Krasinski. He chats with TODAY’s Matt Lauer about the project.

Matt Damon knows the power of a good suit! And that’s what he told the audience when he accepted a Special Career Tribute honor at the 22nd annual Gotham Independent Film Awards presented by the Independent Film Project in New York City last night. “I was here 15 years ago at the Gotham Awards and I remember that because it was right before Good Will Hunting came out and it was the first time my life became surreal because Calvin Klein gave me a suit for free,” he said during his acceptance speech. “I realized I was putting it on, and I added up all the clothes I had ever owned in my life, they wouldn’t be worth as much as the suit I as putting on. I feel very privileged to do what I do. I have never taken it for granted and I never will.” Fast forward 15 years, he can still get as many CK suits as he wants—and picked another one for last night’s event, a symbolic decision (even though the label sponsored the ceremony). “I was putting it on, and I saw that it was Calvin Klein, another free suit, again, that surreal part of my life,” he told InStyle.com of wearing the slate gray style when we caught up with him backstage after his speech. “My wife would tell you that I haven’t transformed at all fashion-wise,” he added. “There are these things where they give you a suit, and so it looks like you know what the hell you are doing!”

The new movie “Promised Land,” which Matt Damon co-wrote and co-produced, came in under budget and ahead of schedule because it had a script, the actor and Oscar-winning screenwriter said Tuesday night in New York. The talk was distributed on the Internet through Livestream.

Damon, who discussed the film along with co-star and co-producer John Krasinski of the NBC sitcom “The Office” and director Gus Van Sant, contrasted that to his last Jason Bourne movie, which he said they were writing day to day while they were shooting it. “It took years off our lives. It was so much pressure because you’re so aware of how much money … once you get on set, the money is just burning.”

He added, “(Director) Paul Greengrass and I would say like we’re in the wrong country. … It was 4 in the morning and we’re on a street and I’m going, Is there anything else we can shoot in Spain?”

Damon said watching “The Bourne Legacy,” the fourth movie in the series based on Robert Ludlum’s novels and the only one in\which he did not appear, was “very odd.” “It had a lot of same bells and whistles of the Bourne series but I didn’t know anything about it.”
That movie made it less likely that Damon will appear in another movie about the assassin with amnesia though “I don’t think it makes it impossible,” he said.

Damon said “Promised Land,” which opens in New York on Dec. 28 and nationwide Jan. 4, was made for slightly less than $18 million. It deals with the controversial procedure of capturing natural gas called fracking.

As we mentioned in our Gotham Awards coverage, this is the week when Focus Features is stepping up their game to get word out on Matt Damon and John Krasinski’s Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant. Earlier today, ComingSoon.net was one of a couple dozen journalists invited to a special luncheon at midtown New York’s prestigious Aquavit restaurant, specializing in Swedish cuisine and famous for kicking off the career of superstar chef Marcus Samuelsson. Damon, Krasinski and Van Sant were all on hand to field questions and talk about their movie in between bites.

Our positive review of the movie is still under embargo, but the film has Matt Damon playing the salesman for a natural gas company who comes to a small town along with a co-worker, played by Frances McDormand, with the intention of leasing land from the local farmers where they can extract natural gas. Along comes an activist named Dustin, played by Krasinski, who throws a monkey wrench in their progress at convincing the locals to sign contracts, and that’s where the film gets interesting.

Damon met Krasinski when he was working with his future wife Emily Blunt on The Adjustment Bureau in New York and they began working on the script together two years ago after author Dave Eggers helped Krasinski develop the story but then had to go off and write his own book.

The film was shot earlier this year outside of Pittsburgh in a small town much like the one in the film and during his time at our table, Krasinski talked to us about how his father’s own small town experiences inspired him to write the screenplay and how freaked out he got when his father visited the set and started pointing out places where they spent time in his youth.

Krasinski also told us an amazing story about his early years as an actor in New York and how he was almost ready to give up when he traveled to Los Angeles and two weeks later booked the pilot of “The Office.” The rest as they say is history.

All three mentioned how the films of Frank Capra and Elia Kazan were hugely influential on the writing process and the feel of the film, and they’re trying hard not to focus too much on the political side of the story and how “fracking” for natural gas has become a huge political and environmental issue in recent years.

When Matt Damon came over to our table, we spoke with him about the process of writing Promised Land with Krasinski and how that differed from writing Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck over 15 years ago while they were both struggling actors. He told us how neither of them had any formal education on how to write a screenplay.

Damon complimented Krasinski on the speed at which his brain worked in terms of trying to figure out the mechanics of the screenplay and we heard some amazing stories from both of them about their co-stars, Frances McDormand and Scoot McNairy.

Krasinski was really impressed by what McDormand brought to her role, seemingly without even trying, although she did tell them at the very beginning of the project that she wouldn’t do any press. It’s a shame since it might be her best performance since the Coens’ Fargo, for which she won her Oscar.

McNairy’s audition so impressed the three of them that they changed one of the characters in order to give him a speech. The speech McNairy gives in the film was originally going to be performed by an older actor whose son went to war in Afghanistan, but after seeing his audition, they changed the role for McNairy. Apparently, McNairy did a reading on camera for Van Sant and after it was over, he started talking about his wife and her own struggles with the subject of the movie. Van Sant started rolling tape again to capture the emotion in McNairy’s story, and the part was changed for him. McNairy is having a bit of a moment, appearing not only in this movie but also Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, opening this weekend, and Ben Affleck’s Argo.

Krasinski also told us how he was crushed when right before last Christmas, Damon decided not to direct the film himself after they had all the pieces in places to go into production, but having to go right into pre-production in January would have kept Damon away from his family for too long.

Director Gus Van Sant filled in the rest of the story, telling us how he came on board in the project’s hour of need when Matt texted him asking if he would read the script and he sent it right over in PDF form before boarding a plane, and Van Sant decided to do it. Van Sant talked about some of his sound design and production decisions and how his style has changed from ten years ago when he made Elephant.

Since this was a fairly informal luncheon, we also talked about more esoteric New Yorker topics like the new Barclay Center in Brooklyn (thumbs up from Matt!), living on the Upper East Side (Krasinski and a couple other journalists, not us) and such. Even though both actors are from Boston, they both try to spend as much time in the city as possible.

Hopefully we’ll have more formal interviews with actual quotes from the trio sometime leading up to Promised Land’s release in New York and L.A. on December 28 and wide release on January 4, 2013.

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